For the sixth straight weekend, hundreds of thousands of Koreans came out in Seoul (and with other Korean cities estimates approaching 2 million people on the streets) to demand the resignation of President Park Geun-hye. This Saturday December 3, the protests marched on the Presidential Blue House. The three opposition parties introduced a bill last week to impeach the President, supported by a majority of the parliament (171 of 300 members), for abuse of power in an influence-peddling scandal. But the vote needs a 2/3 majority and requires a rump of Park’s Saenuri party to break and support the opposition to pass the bill.

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The demolition of Palestinian homes for Israeli settlements reached a ten-year high in 2016. While this activity led by the fanatical settler movement is illegal under international law, it is completely aided and abetted by the Israeli government.

With hundreds on notice to be evicted and their homes destroyed, Abby Martin goes on-the-ground throughout the West Bank investigating this dire human rights situation. She speaks to residents living under regular settler attacks from encroaching settlements and outposts illegal even under Israeli law, and sees first-hand how this crisis is worsening. http://multimedia.telesurtv.net/v/the-empire-files-608068/

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Abby Martin goes on-the-ground to the epicenters of state-backed settler terrorism in Palestine’s West Bank, in Part II of her report on illegal Israeli settlements and home demolitions – teleSUR production Watch Part I here

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In the wake of Brexit and Trump, ‘mainstream’ media have done the formerly unthinkable by focusing on media bias. The intensity of focus has been such that the Oxford Dictionaries have announced that ‘post-truth’ is their ‘Word of the Year 2016’.

‘Post-truth’ refers to ‘circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. Continue reading this...

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Yes, you can—in the same sense that you can blame bad luck on black cats.

Before the election, corporate media nonsensically tried to blame the rise of Donald Trump on Millennials (FAIR.org, 10/10/16)—and now, after the election, the Washington Post is still at it.

“Yes, You Can Blame Millennials for Hillary Clinton’s Loss” was the headline over a piece by the Post‘s Aaron Blake (12/2/16). “Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said Thursday that one particular group is especially to blame: Millennials.” Blake quoted another Post story citing Mook’s claim that “younger voters, perhaps assuming that Clinton was going to win, migrated to third-party candidates in the final days of the race.” “That’s why we lost,” Mook said. Continue reading this...

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What can go wrong?

That he may not be “qualified” is unimportant.

That he’s never held a government or elected position is unimportant.

That on a personal level he may be a shmuck is unimportant.

What counts to me mainly at this early stage is that he – as opposed to dear Hillary – is unlikely to start a war against Russia. His questioning of the absolute sacredness of NATO, calling it “obsolete”, and his meeting with Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, an outspoken critic of US regime-change policy, specifically Syria, are encouraging signs.

In the weeks since the November 8 US presidential election, the dim outlines of what a Trump presidency might look like are beginning to appear. Trump continues to retreat on several fronts from his campaign ‘right populist’ positions, while doubling-down on other radical positions he previously proposed during the campaign. How to make sense of his apparent evolving policy divergence? Continue reading this...

The Washington Post (11/24/16) last week published a front-page blockbuster that quickly went viral: Russia-promoted “fake news” had infiltrated the newsfeeds of 213 million Americans during the election, muddying the waters in a disinformation scheme to benefit Donald Trump. Craig Timberg’s story was based on a “report” from an anonymous group (or simply a person, it’s unclear) calling itself PropOrNot that blacklisted over 200 websites as agents or assets of the Russian state.

The US corporate media, its strings pulled by the modern version of the Central Intelligence Agency’s old Operation MOCKINGBIRD media influencing operation, is laughably accusing Russia of generating «fake news» to influence the outcome of the American presidential election. In a November 24, 2016, article in the CIA-connected Washington Post, reporter Craig Timberg reported: «Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human ‘trolls,’ and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers». The Post’s article is worthy of the CIA-generated propaganda spun by the paper at the height of the Cold War-era MOCKINGBIRD.

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The New York Times (11/29/16) declares that Carrier’s job announcement “signals that Mr. Trump is a different kind of Republican.”

The Carrier company’s announcement that, after exhortations from Donald Trump, it was going to move a thousand jobs overseas—rather than the 2,000 that it had previously planned to move—led New York Times reporter Nelson Schwartz (11/29/16) to declare that “Mr. Trump is a different kind of Republican, willing to take on big business, at least in individual cases”:

Just as only a confirmed anti-Communist like Richard Nixon could go to China, so only a businessman like Mr. Trump could take on corporate America without being called a Bernie Sanders–style socialist. If Barack Obama had tried the same maneuver, he’d probably have drawn criticism for intervening in the free market.